More Evidence Antisocial Media Needs to Die

 5/23/26 New York Post:

A 14-year-old boy is dead and an 18-year-old is fighting for his life after a subway surfing stunt turned tragic on the Williamsburg Bridge Friday evening.

However much you love antisocial media: if v you feed the beast, kids will still do stupithings for attention.  Starve the beast; restore civilization.

Time to Disengage From Antisocial Media

1/28/26 Newsweek article about angry conservative attacking Rep. Omar with apple cider vinegar captures how antisocial media feedback loop is polarizing American society.  Rep. Omar is a pretty despicable person and deserves serious criticism.   A syringe of apple cider vinegar is not "serious criticism." It is not free speech. It is a criminal assault that actually accomplishes nothing but gin up sympathy for a member of the Squad.

Walk away from a system that makes money off meanness and hatred! There are plenty of places to get news and commentary that are not feedback loop driven (like your favorite blog).

Please Suggest a Solution For America

Australia's ban on antisocial media for those under 16 seems a logical attempt at returning useful literacy and maturity to kids.  Pretty clearly, this is not possible in America. Aside from the enormous need that parents have to fob off parenting to anyone else, there are likely constitutional questions. Is there any way to give the next generation a chance?

Govern, Do Not Do Social Media

12/15/25 AP;

"WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Monday blamed Rob Reiner’s outspoken opposition to the president for the actor-director’s killing, delivering the unsubstantiated claim in a shocking post that seemed intent on decrying his opponents even in the face of a tragedy."

He could have pointed to the hints that Reiner's son's mental health problems were a factor or even better, let friends and family grieve.  Trump needs to govern more and social media way less 

Letting the left determine how he reacts is playing into their hand 

Can We Be Next?

 12/9/25 NBC News:

Can children and teenagers be forced off social media en masse? Australia is about to find out.

More than 1 million social media accounts held by users under 16 are set to be deactivated in Australia on Wednesday in a divisive world-first ban that has inflamed a culture war and is being closely watched in the United States and elsewhere.

Social media companies will have to take “reasonable steps” to ensure that under-16s in Australia cannot set up accounts on their platforms and that existing accounts are deactivated or removed.

Australian officials say the landmark ban, which lawmakers swiftly approved late last year, is meant to protect children from addictive social media platforms that experts say can be disastrous for their mental health.

“With one law, we can protect Generation Alpha from being sucked into purgatory by predatory algorithms described by the man who created the feature as ‘behavioral cocaine,’” Communications Minister Anika Wells told the National Press Club in Canberra last week.

While many parents and even their children have welcomed the ban, others say it will hinder young people’s ability to express themselves and connect with others, as well as access online support that is crucial for those from marginalized groups or living in isolated parts of rural Australia. Two 15-year-olds have brought a legal challenge against it to the nation’s highest court.

Supporters say the rest of the world will soon follow the example set by the Australian ban, which faced fierce resistance from social media companies.

They can express themaselves the way several thousand generations of young people have done: face to face with friends; through art, music, repairing stuff and playing (remember what that is).  Or like my friends and me, learning to program computers* and doig dangerous projects involving low grade explosives and hydrogen balloons.  None of us lost fingers.

*Building web pages with SquareSpace or editing silly cat videos does far less intellectual development than learning how to write interrupt service routines.

 

Do Your Kids Still Have Antisocial Media?

Why?  This 5/16/25 Racket article about the Meta antitrust trial includes a disturbing section that seems to resist cut and past3 at least on my phone.  Facebook looked for evidence of grooming and found lots of it.  Worse they admit that they intentionally underfunded efforts to prevent it.

I expect this in public schools, at least in Blue States.  

If You Create a Twitter Account to Show Support for Musk Wresting Control Away From the Fascists...

Notice that Elon Musk's account has the title "Chief Twit "

I just tweeted.  Likely the only tweet I will ever do.

Common Carrier Status Bites Antisocial Media

NetChoice v. Paxton (5th Cir. 2022) struck down a district court's preliminary injunction against a Texas law that prohibited antisocial media from viewpoint-discrimination and free speech with several minor but completely defensible exceptions.  In brief they decided that being common carriers under federal law (which protects them from responsibility for libel or slander) means that they cannot violate the free speech rights of Texans (which in practice protects the rights of anyone because Texans have the right to speak and read the opinions of others). Repeatedly, the decision emphasizes that this law does not deny the antisocial media companies' freedom of speech but their freedom of censorship.   The companies are free to speak freely in opposition to crimethink but they may not prohibit it except in three very narrow categories.

I know many libertarian organizations defend censorship because these are private companies and besides many libertarian organizations are really more sympathetic to suppression of anti-LGBT speech than any real support of free speech.  (They might start sounding conservative if they supported the right to say icky things about an important libertarian affinity group.)

This is pretty major.  Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are going to need to allow awful people like former President Trump, the New York Post, and the rest of the "semi-fascists" to share the modern public square with BLM, Antifa, and the Democratic Party.

This is not the final decision but at least it is not a slam dunk by the world's most powerful and richest corporations to maintain control of acceptable speech.

For some reason, I am unable to reply to comments.  If a group wants to meet in a restrained environment, do not use antisocial media.  Under the current rules, the hypothetical group mentioned would likely be prohibited anyway for homophobic content.  The Texas law does not prevent free speech (what the 1st Amendment protects), it prevents censorship.

Bigotry

 Great video of Twitter employee making fun of Elon Musk as "special needs."  I am sure that a lot of true "special needs" parents are going to be so happy to hear this sort of leftist crap.  Even better, this idiot was warned by Twitter about the danger of Project Veritas with no awareness that this was Project Veritas to whom he was spilling the beans.

How Serious is the Ivermectin Overdose Problem?

 There is this 9/4/21 NPR report:

According to the National Poison Data System (NPDS), which collects information from the nation's 55 poison control centers, there was a 245% jump in reported exposure cases from July to August — from 133 to 459.

Even a single case is a bad thing, but 459 overdoses in a nation of 320 million people is not dramatic.  From 12/2/21 New England Journal of Medicine:

The Oregon Poison Center is a telephone consultative center staffed by specialty-trained nurses, pharmacists, and physicians who provide treatment advice for the public and comprehensive treatment consultation for health care workers caring for patients in Oregon, Alaska, and Guam. The center has recently received an increasing number of calls regarding ivermectin exposure related to Covid-19. The rate of calls regarding ivermectin had been 0.25 calls per month in 2020 and had increased to 0.86 calls per month from January through July 2021; in August 2021, the center received 21 calls. Monthly total call volumes for all poison exposures were stable throughout 2020 and 2021.

Again, a troubling increase but relative to other causes of illness (e.g., COVID-19), this is pretty minor. 

Of the 21 persons who called in August, 11 were men, and most were older than 60 years of age (median age, 64; range, 20 to 81). Approximately half (11 persons) were reported to have used ivermectin to prevent Covid-19, and the remaining persons had been using the drug to treat Covid-19 symptoms. Three persons had received prescriptions from physicians or veterinarians, and 17 had purchased veterinary formulations; the source of ivermectin for the remaining person was not confirmed. Symptoms had developed in most persons within 2 hours after a large, single, first-time dose. In 6 persons, symptoms had developed gradually after several days to weeks of repeated doses taken every other day or twice weekly. One person had also been taking vitamin D to treat or prevent Covid-19. Reported doses ingested by the persons who had been using veterinary products ranged from 6.8 mg to 125 mg of 1.87% paste and 20 to 50 mg of the 1% solution. The dose of the human-use tablets was 21 mg per dose twice weekly for prevention.[emphasis added]

So 3 of those 21 cases were prescribed in human doses.  Note that the widely claimed suppository use of ivermectin by the deplorable rubes does not appear.

Six of the 21 persons were hospitalized for toxic effects from ivermectin use; all 6 reported preventive use, including the 3 who had obtained the drug by prescription. Four received care in an intensive care unit, and none died. Symptoms were gastrointestinal distress in 4 persons, confusion in 3, ataxia and weakness in 2, hypotension in 2, and seizures in 1. Of the persons who were not admitted to a hospital, most had gastrointestinal distress, dizziness, confusion, vision symptoms, or rash.

These are definitely ugly side effects, but they are not the life-threatening symptoms of COVID-19.  If ivermectin is ineffective against COVID-19 (as FDA claims), it represents an individualized consequence for experimental stupidity.  The widely reported (and I presume, highly shared) story of Oklahoma hospitals backed up by ivermectin overdoses turned out to be false.  But if it is widely shared on social media, for many people it becomes evidence of widespread anti-scientism.

Watching the Implosion Start

 I found this link at SmallDeadAnimals. 2/3/22 Daily Mail:

Facebook loses users for the first time EVER: Shares plummet 20%, wiping $200BN off value of parent-firm Meta after it revealed 500,000 fewer daily log-ins and declining profits - Zuckerberg's personal wealth takes $29BN hit

• CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes Facebook's decline in users is likely due to the boom in popularity of the competitor platform TikTok
• Facebook reported a nearly half million drop in daily users during the last three months of 2021, with only 1.93 billion users logging in each day
• Facebook's parent company, Meta, saw its stock plunge 22.6% during after-hours trading on Wednesday
• If the drop holds until the market opens Thursday, the company's market capitalization - its overall value - is on track to drop by nearly $200 billion

If you are one of the many who have dropped Facebook as your major source of disinformation, good!  If not, why not.  To paraphrase Obama, "At a certain point, Zuckerberg, you need to say, 'You have enough.'"  Money and power.